Waaay Back: Louisiana

Cleaning up: An out of place boat

Ah, Louisiana. I'm thinking of going back there. Of all of the places I've lived in the U.S.A, I think that New Orleans, that damp and fated city, is the most...well, what can I say that hasn't already been said? It's a city that resonated deeply with me. I really don't even know much about Louisiana or New Orleans, just the little I found out while staying there post-Katrina for a few months.

Things that struck me: I always come back to that scent of the Sweet Olive Tree. I've smelled it since and studied it. It's an amazing smell, like the most fragrant rose mixed with blood orange and grass. But it was love at first sniff for me because I never knew where it was coming from. I'd be walking down Government street in Baton Rouge (a grey, dreary street if I've ever seen one), and suddenly this delicious smell would override the gutter animal corpses and the exhaust fumes of the passing "lemons" (I think LA has the most derelict cars of any state...judging by shoulders of US 10 littered with flat-tired heaps). I would look around, but I could never find the source. In Oakland, CA, I finally did. There was a bush/tree around my Jewel Box neighborhood, with little tiny green flowers, but you had to go across the street to smell them. The scent has a sort of ventriloquist quality.

The Mardi Gras Spirit

I love Carnival. New Orleans has the best Carnival in the USA, I think. It's not like other fun parades and street parties, where you get excited for it to happen maybe a week before, and then it happens and is fun and is over. Mardi Gras runs deep, even when it takes place only a few months after an incredibly debilitating disaster. So, this is also alluring to me. The elusive scent of a tree and Mardi Gras. I think that sounds like a solid reason to move, don't you?

Back in Time: Medellîn

Hernan

It was a small, plaster house, painted white with turquoise and orange trim. On its outside walls, ropes, saddles and tools hung among toy babies, old boots, rusted drill bits, masks, weighty keys, horse shoes, tree branches, spoons, and glass soda bottles. The effect was astonishing, to be greeted upon arrival by his carefully selected and arranged junk.

Hernan Collects Stuff

Our arrival here was unexpected. My sister Molly and I were staying at the countryside house of Rafa, a man who worked at our hostel in Medellín. We had traveled the 45 minutes to Santa Elena on a crowded bus, a beautiful journey through flowering mountains that had ended prematurely when our bus was hit by a motorcycle. We walked the rest of the way to Rafa’s house, through dewey blackberry fields and muddy riverside paths.

Fields of Blackberries

Now, the next day, we were walking again, to Hernàn’s house. Ahead of us, Rafa and his girlfriend negotiated the rocky dirt road on a moto, leaving Molly, Sergio and me to our feet. The incline was negligible, but at 2800 meters above sea level, I felt like I was breathing with mesh lungs. Before our 20-minute ramble through the graceful, grassy hills was through, I had given up on my broken conversations with Sergio and he was chain-smoking. Our pace slowed as we approached a borrachero tree, and Sergio explained that from the fruit of this tree, Colombian thieves and kidnappers make a drug that turns their victims into zombies, losing their will power and memory. By the tree was a foot-bridge, and across the bridge was our destination, the house of Hernán.

In front of this unusual house, set among flowers and moss and drug trees and junk, stood Rafa and a small, fit, brown old man. Like other campesinos I had met, Hernán wore muddy rubber boots up to his knees. His grey mustache was bushy and his missing teeth added unquestionably to his charm. In the middle of his face, smiling eyes reached towards the upturned corners of his mouth, making a friendly shape. I immediately felt comfortable surrendering control over the day to this alluring old man.

Inside his house, we learned more about Hernán. His walls were covered with stuff. The living room was a showcase of newspaper articles, portraits and photographs of important people, and posters from political rallies. His bedroom was elegantly decorated with sloping lines of diagonally aligned booklets. Inside the house, every surface was adorned with something, but the kitchen he had left alone because he enjoyed the natural effect of blackened walls that resulted from 80 years of cooking on an open wood stove.

Book Lover

A Kitchen

Hernán’s family had lived in this house for three generations. A farming family, they had at some point decided to focus on flowers. Santa Elena, on the outskirts of Medellín, is part of what is considered “flower country” in Colombia. Hernán, now in his 70s, was raised among the blooms. He was one of the original sillateros, artists who arrange enormous and intricate flower displays to be carried through the streets of Medellín during the annual Feria de las Flores. The wooden chair now used to hold a sillatero’s display used to be used by campesinos to carry the sick and elderly around the mountains. Showing us his own patinaed silleto, he told us that only a few weeks ago he had proudly displayed the flowers grown in his and his siblings’ gardens.

Hernan's Craft

Soon, Rafa and Olga were ready to go, but Molly and I decided to stay with Sergio to manufacture an antenna for Hernán’s one-channel television set. Mission accomplished, the four of us set off through the fields to find a place to celebrate. But the fields held another mission, and after buying two bottles of harsh anise Aguardiente at a nearly inaccessible bodega, we were wandering through the meadows and cows, peering desperately at the ground for little hills of yellow grass. Molly and I finally learned that Santa Elena was not only fertile for flowers, and that in these fields, hallucinogenic mushrooms were springing up everywhere. The only trouble was that they were very difficult to find under the matted grass, and so Sergio had enlisted the expert eyes of Hernán to find these sellable gifts from the earth. Molly and I contented ourselves with tiny plastic cups of Aguardiente, and soon the day became ridiculous. Roaming the pathless hills, we passed cows with holes through their torsos, and young lovers singing with guitars. Everything was charming, and we knew that Hernán felt the same when, at the end of the day, he brought us to his brother’s garden of many acres and arranged for us a bouquet worthy of the winning Queen of the Flowers.

Sorry, no pictures of the cow.

I wish that we had parted ways then, with the sun setting and our arms full of blossoms and mushrooms. We didn’t though, and the night deteriorated with more Aguardiente and less light. Luckily, the only one of us who really lost face was Segio, and as Hernán rode off on the back of Rafa’s moto at the end of the night, I was left with memories of a perfect caballero.